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I’m hoping to generate some good discussion with this video so please feel free to comment below
You’re focusing on the materialism part, not the dialectical part, which is the issue. Chomsky comes from a massively different philosophical paradigm, analytic philosophy, so dialectical materialism is incommensurable with pretty much all of his training and his work. The words it uses are the same, to a certain extent, with the words he uses, but their meanings and the web connecting them to other words is totally alien. Efforts to bridge that gap and make it intelligible to non-dialecticians have been attempted, but they only succeeded in making all the diaMat folks very angry.
In much the same way that when I read Mao’s On Contradiction, or Engel’s Dialectics of Nature, it all comes off as total nonsense, because from the western scientific perspective (which is just one perspective), it is.
I mean it doesn’t really require any digging into analytic philosophies. Chomsky and Marx speak two different philosophical languages, and Chomsky doesn’t care enough to learn an entirely new language to render a judgement on Marx, so he just dismisses it as gibberish, which to him, it is.
To answer your original question, basically it’s analogous to Einstein not understanding cantonese despite being one smart cookie.
You won’t catch me dead defending Western STEM peep’s tolerance of methodological pluralism, but in my experience, they’re only exceptional in the degree, not quality of their intellectual chauvinism.
yeah it’s hard to believe, it seems out of character, but I saw it few months ago (maybe even a year ago?), he wasn’t saying he disagrees with it, he was flat out saying he couldn’t make any sense of it and there’s nothing to disagree with like there’s nothing to disagree with because it doesn’t even make sense. I’m not even sure when the interview was filmed other than he’s pretty old looking so like the last 10-15 years, I’ll try to find and link it to you later.
I think it’s from an interview he gave, but the piece I’ve seen is from his book Understanding Power, page 228. Here’s the quote:
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? 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.
I’m no fan of Chomsky, but even still, that whole section is kinda wild. He says Marxism is basically just theology and “an irrational cult”, and then takes deep issue with the name “marxism” because we should just absorb the good ideas thinkers and scientists have and move forward from them? I don’t know, it comes off to me as an incredibly juvenile and unserious critique. Noam is obviously smart, but he just obviously doesn’t give a shit about even trying to understand marxism. Obviously he’s not one, but it comes off as intellectually lazy.
ah thanks for finding that, I’ve been looking for the interview and couldn’t find this one I was looking for, I guess I misremembered how old he was in the interview if that’s the one I saw? Or maybe he just repeated similar phrasing in an interview in the last few years…
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You’re focusing on the materialism part, not the dialectical part, which is the issue. Chomsky comes from a massively different philosophical paradigm, analytic philosophy, so dialectical materialism is incommensurable with pretty much all of his training and his work. The words it uses are the same, to a certain extent, with the words he uses, but their meanings and the web connecting them to other words is totally alien. Efforts to bridge that gap and make it intelligible to non-dialecticians have been attempted, but they only succeeded in making all the diaMat folks very angry.
In much the same way that when I read Mao’s On Contradiction, or Engel’s Dialectics of Nature, it all comes off as total nonsense, because from the western scientific perspective (which is just one perspective), it is.
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I mean it doesn’t really require any digging into analytic philosophies. Chomsky and Marx speak two different philosophical languages, and Chomsky doesn’t care enough to learn an entirely new language to render a judgement on Marx, so he just dismisses it as gibberish, which to him, it is.
To answer your original question, basically it’s analogous to Einstein not understanding cantonese despite being one smart cookie.
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You won’t catch me dead defending Western STEM peep’s tolerance of methodological pluralism, but in my experience, they’re only exceptional in the degree, not quality of their intellectual chauvinism.
Red Menace has a couple of good episodes for “On Contradiction.”
yeah it’s hard to believe, it seems out of character, but I saw it few months ago (maybe even a year ago?), he wasn’t saying he disagrees with it, he was flat out saying he couldn’t make any sense of it and there’s nothing to disagree with like there’s nothing to disagree with because it doesn’t even make sense. I’m not even sure when the interview was filmed other than he’s pretty old looking so like the last 10-15 years, I’ll try to find and link it to you later.
I think it’s from an interview he gave, but the piece I’ve seen is from his book Understanding Power, page 228. Here’s the quote:
I’m no fan of Chomsky, but even still, that whole section is kinda wild. He says Marxism is basically just theology and “an irrational cult”, and then takes deep issue with the name “marxism” because we should just absorb the good ideas thinkers and scientists have and move forward from them? I don’t know, it comes off to me as an incredibly juvenile and unserious critique. Noam is obviously smart, but he just obviously doesn’t give a shit about even trying to understand marxism. Obviously he’s not one, but it comes off as intellectually lazy.
ah thanks for finding that, I’ve been looking for the interview and couldn’t find this one I was looking for, I guess I misremembered how old he was in the interview if that’s the one I saw? Or maybe he just repeated similar phrasing in an interview in the last few years…
https://hexbear.net/comment/3738042
Can’t find the video interview I watched but this is at least pretty close to what I remember watching him say