So it is weird in that chapter, I was just thinking back, it's weird in the chapter on this isms that we don't have antisemitism, which I think is a persistent and perpetual problem of the Western nation-state system in perpetuity, in part because the nation-state always assumes a single nation and state, and these nationalists fear the insider who looks like them, right? And so it's always been, we can get into this in more detail. Anti-Semitism is a key part of the modern nation state system.
That's just a full stop. That's not that there isn't other isms as well. And so we have settler colonialism, which we've talked about. We have Islamophobia, which we'll talk quite a bit about next class. We have all sorts of other isms that don't come in here, I guess, because they aren't a coherent political ideology.
But if you look at the rise of hate crimes with the rise of the right, I mean, the top of the list is persistent anti-Semitism in these contexts. So it's weird that it's absent. I would just say that.
Anarchism also has a problem with anti-Semitism too. But again, I'm assuming this will come back when we start dealing with identity categories, but I do think it's an ism as well. All right. So remember, ideologies arise during social disruptions in deeply polarized societies. So in types of political contestation.
We have both anarchism, populism as examples as well here. So anarchism, okay, inspired by movements on the left and right again. Okay. I don't know what that means.
Like, what is a monarchist anarchist? Sure, whatever. And a rejection of hierarchical forms of governance. Sure, I will say that they have two, I put three in here. Because I am influenced, I would say by the one which is just the anthropological analysis.
of bodies that refuse authority. I find it interesting. It doesn't mean I'm an anarchist, it just means I find it interesting and we should probably talk about it.
So three distinct categories, social collectivist anarchism, individual anarchism, historical anarchism. Like all the other categories, which I'm okay with with fascism, but probably not communism. We don't have any good examples here.
We don't really talk about the ways in which these systems are organized. We just talk about them as non-organized. So Occupy, for example, had hand signals.
I've tried to use them in class every once in a while. Agree, don't agree, oppose, block, point of order, clarify, direct response, want to talk. So it was in Occupy.
Occupy had a radically non-hierarchical structure during the Occupy movements. And this was the way that they would organize discussion. So in liberal democratic discussion, we have Robert's Rules of Order.
There's a book. You can just download it. on how to run meetings.
So I used to be a parent council chair at my local public school when my daughter was there. I was the chair. We'd follow Robert's rules of order.
When I am in a department meeting, we follow Robert's rules of order. It's the rules of order that have occupied. So this was an easier way for non-hierarchical organizations to organize themselves because they don't really have chairs and things like that. There's a hierarchical order in Robert's rule of order. There's ways to exploit it too in order to make sure that people talk or don't talk, right?
That's the benefit of it. Okay. So anarchism in the socialist collectivist framework, property is theft. So this is why they're trying to make the link here between this and libertarianism. So kind of far right stuff.
I'll come back to that again when we talk about the technocratic forms of this. The creation of worker syndicates. So this is anarcho-syndicalism. So anarcho-syndicalism, instead of having like a top-down labor union, it's like a mutually created form of syndicalism that allows kind of for more freedom.
And, you know, Chomsky is a kind of public advocate of anarchism and anarchist critique. He would be a kind of, I guess, a weak social anarchist, I guess he would call it himself. His book, Manufacturing Consent, just talks about the ways in which the mass media reinforces the hierarchy and authority of existing systems.
He famously looks at, during the East Timor crisis, the ways in which the New York Times just supported the American positions against data and evidence. So it said it was ideological, right? So it does this. Here's a little bit of Chomsky talking about those things.
Um... anarchist thought and crucially anarchist action. Well, I think a sensible approach can start with remarks by the perceptive, important anarchist intellectual. activist Rudolf Röcker.
I'll quote him. He saw anarchism not as a fixed self-enclosed social system with a fixed answer to all the multifarious questions and problems of human life. but rather as a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which strives for the free, unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life. It's from the 1930s. These concepts are not really original.
They derive from the Enlightenment and the early Romantic period. In rather similar words, Wilhelm Falkenstein, von Humboldt, one of the founders of classical liberalism, among many other achievements, described the leading principle of his thought as the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity. That's a phrase that John Stuart Mill took as the epigraph to his On Liberty.
It's interesting that everybody's referencing Mill, right? So that is to say that we have to go through these liberal, that there's a bounding... to liberalism and capitalism and thinking about these things in all the other approaches because we're always engaging with them. That's the relevance of the canon, right? It follows from that that institutions that constrain such human development are illegitimate unless, of course, they can somehow justify themselves.
You find a similar conception widely in Enlightenment thought. So, for example, in Adam Smith, everyone has read the opening paragraphs of Wealth of Nations, where he extols the wonders of division of labor. But not many people have gotten farther inside to read his bitter condemnation of division of labor and his insistence that in any civilized society, the government will have to intervene to prevent it because it will destroy personal integrity and essential human rights. We'll turn people, he said, into creatures. as stupid and ignorant as a human can be.
It's not too easy to find that passage, whatever the reason may be. If you look in the Standard Scholarly Edition, the University of Chicago Bicentennial Edition, it's not even listed in the index. But it's one of the most important passages in the book. Looked at in these terms, anarchism is a tendency in human... development that seeks to identify structures of hierarchy, domination, authority, and others that constrain human development.
And then it seeks to subject them to a very reasonable challenge. Justify yourself. So that's very Enlightenment, right, and very liberal to say, okay, what are the reasonable foundations for your claims? Because often forms of hierarchy and authority don't ever re-establish their foundation, right? Like this chapter doesn't make it clear what its perspective is when it's talking.
So I'll let him finish and then we'll move on. I don't want too much. Demonstrate that you're legitimate and maybe in some special circumstances or conceivably in principle. And if you can't meet that challenge, which is the usual case, the structure should be dismantled. And as Nathan rightly adds, not just dismantled, but reconstructed from below.
the... Okay, we get it. So it's this idea of doing it.
So there's all of these ideas bound up in them, anti-authoritarianism, collectivism, direct action, internationalism, anti-nationalism, and anti-Marxism in particular, because they see those frameworks or the demand for state intervention, and then the withering of the state. So state intervention under socialism, withering of the state under Marxism, to be still the use of the state. they're against that. Contemporary examples, there's forms of anti-fascist movements in the black bloc.
I've been seeing a lot of black bloc protesters in my day. And so they all, you know, all anarchists, well, it's just some anarchists eschew violence. I don't know.
Again, there's this obsession with violence. The black bloc's been implicated in violence. Lots of Lots of fascist, anti-fascist and anarchist movements have been implicated in violence. They don't really care. But, you know, for Chomsky, his key thing is that the truth should, we should speak truth to power.
This is very Aristotelian or Platonic, and we'll get to that in a minute. Utopianism in practice. There's a whole book on this. I mean, there's a Chapo Trap House episode on this about how this libertarian utopia established in. didn't have the infrastructure in place to deal with the types of things that collectively we pool resources to prevent.
And so we have that social collectivist anarchism, we have the individualist anarchism, which is very much this kind of libertarianism, right? This type of this rejection of the legitimacy of government, the maximization of individual freedom from government control. For me, the easiest example is the crypto libertarians. If you look at Nakamoto, who created Bitcoin, he embedded in the first social blog, got a paper written on this, that Bitcoin was an explicit response to the bank bailouts. So their idea was, is that we can't trust the government anymore.
Let's build our own money. And so largely about this idea of in the crypto libertarian vision, individual liberty, privacy and encryption. So encryption, so the state shouldn't have the right to view your stuff. Decentralization, monetary freedom, cyber. funka deals which i it should be h in there i think but um we don't have to get into that too much um voluntary interactions and contracts that's what ethereum is based it's a cryptocurrency that allows you to do contracts that are mutually framed so you don't need outside state to to authorize your contracts technological innovation and disruption right so about disrupting forms of oppression right they see that now the problem with that framework is that you get this is famously mark zuckerberg with the motto that he should move fast and break things.
One of those being, you know, democracy. That this is one of the things that he can break by platforming all sorts of myths and disinformation, right? And so the other one, like these innovators come in with these technological anarchist ideas of how individuals can be freed through the lack of state control.
You know, government or Google Sidewalk Labs. It was this fantastic project that was going to develop in Danto Toronto, there's a ton written on it, that basically was this libertarian vision of everything being done through Google's networks and everything could be paid for wirelessly and we could live in this place except Google wanted to control all the data because that's freedom from government intervention. The problem, of course, was that part of the territory they wanted was church territory and good luck getting churches off their territory. And this is what happened to the great innovative sidewalk labs.
It's now a budget rent-a-car. That's the only building that's left and that's what came of it. So anarchism as a way of challenging authority makes a ton of sense, as a way of organizing new spaces has a degree of fallibility which can't be overstated.
That said too, there are lots of anarchist communities that organize themselves and states see them as a threat to their monopoly on the use of force and crush them mercilessly. So it's not always on their side. It's that, like, this is the problem with open systems. All of these different systems are interacting with one another, which creates all sorts of deviations from their utopianism, right? Like, the liberal capitalism has to respond to the idea that communists is taking all these peasants and making them middle class workers, right?
And so this becomes a challenge to the legitimacy. of your ideal system when somebody else can develop their alternatives to it. And so in creating this coherent ideological space, there's this obsession with the idea of freedom, but then the freedom devolves into things that people don't seem to want.
And that these anarchist vision, I mean, Twitter is acquisition, right? That this idea of creating a free speech platform, okay, but... If you want to maintain that platform, you have to make sure this is Zuboff talks about this in her book on surveillance capitalism.
She said, one of the problems of YouTube in particular, was that it would platform anti-Semitism next to a product or service. And you could screen cap that and then send it to Tide and say, why is your product next to anti-Semitic hate? And if they want to maintain the business, they have to make the businesses happy. And in order to do that, You run into this problem that freedom is gonna True freedom is going to produce all sorts of stuff that as a society, as any group, is going to want social regulation, just at a bare crassest level, because they don't want their product associated with that. And so this has been the perpetual problem of creating a coherent ideological space for these kind of these crypto utopians, is that they can certainly platform stuff, they can certainly mobilize certain amounts of the population.
We just don't think it's a majority of the population, right? And so this kind of perpetual problem of these. Now we'll come back to this with populism in a minute.