Thanks to all that submitted questions for the Frithjof Bergmann Q&A. I was able to get to the majority of them, though not all. It's possible we'll do another one of these, but where and how it gets posted is undermined at this point.
Go listen to it here.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Glen Stratton says
November 1, 2013 at 8:45 pmThis stuff is in line with anarchism in so many ways. Opposition to strict division of is key to transforming our lives by making labor what it should be: something we want to do because it allows us to develop ourselves and exercise our creativity. Marx said this, Humboldt said this. Pretty much all the classical liberals are in this vein.
Toby K says
November 1, 2013 at 9:30 pmYeah, Frithjof’s criticism of Marxism was also very much in line with anarchist critiques.
Mark Linsenmayer says
November 2, 2013 at 11:01 amWe’ll for sure cover some anarchism, we’re now tentatively booked through Feb. with other things.
With some of the questions I asked, he focused on one part of it and really went off on it without us getting around to addressing the other parts, so while I get his gripe about Marxism, I don’t think it hurts to acknowledge that “unalienated labor” and workers themselves owning the means of production (which is what community production amounts to) are classical Marxist concepts.
Anarchism, and hardcore Marxism, are to me foreign sociological/intellectual niches much like those Lacanian theorists and Randians and hardcore etymologists (a la Brann) that I now understand a bit more due to our concentrating on them for a bit for an episode.
I can certainly see politically why if you’re trying to talk to regular people and convince them of some concrete ways of changing the world, you don’t start by making them read Bakunin or Marx or anything else. Frithjof is determined that his project not be an intellectual critique, much less a critique of a critique, and is not particularly interested in exploring how Zizek or whoever else is talking about something faintly related except insofar as doing so would hook his organization up with organizations of those people to work to a common purpose.
So whether or not what he’s proposing is original is of pretty much no consequence to him, and in fact it’s much better if he can point to Aristotle or Keynes or whomever and say “see, all these clear-thinking minds have come to the right conclusion.”
Given that I’m reading Rawls right now, I’d have to disagree with the claim that all “classical liberals” share his worldview. Rawls (considered the foundation of modern liberalism by some) shares the English/social contract theorist view that you do social planning by figuring out how to adjudicate between the rational desires of autonomous agents. For Bergmann (following Hegel and Nietzsche) the whole point is figuring out how to make people into autonomous agents who have authentic desires, which does involve freeing them from physical wage/time-slavery, yes, but not only that. Does anarchism affirm that social structures are necessary and helpful in human development, or is it a rejection of all such structures to free up the Noble Savage in all of us?
Toby K says
November 2, 2013 at 12:14 pmGreat points Mark. I completely understand why Frithjof would want to disassociate the New Work project from terms like ‘socialism’ and ‘Marxism’ (and particularly ‘anarchism’, a seriously misunderstood word). While I appreciate that claims to originality are not important to him, it would have been nice for him to talk a bit about how New Work relates to other political ideas, given that he was on a philosophy podcast. New Work has so much in common with anarchism, not just in any kind of theoretical sense, but also practically. Go to any anarchist website, and the sort of things they recommend doing sound just like what Frithjof is asking people to do: start community gardens, get the word out on the movement, organize your workplace, get alternative means of energy production in your community (solar, wind, etc). New Work could be seen as a particular mode of direct action.
I certainly don’t want to disparage New Work as simply anarchism that has been co-opted to Frithjof’s own ends; I think there are some seriously great ideas behind it, and its rejection of jargon (‘solidarity’ is the one Frithjof mentioned in the episode) is admirable.
As for your question, I think it presents something of a false dichotomy. While a minority of anarchists (individualists in the tradition of Stirner, post-left anarchists, anarcho-primitivists, et al.) heavily emphasize “the rejection of all such structures to free up the Noble Savage in all of us?” (although they wouldn’t use the term ‘noble savage’) and largely reject significant social organization, the majority would want a synthesis of the two. This position (which is my own) says that social structures, as long as they are entirely non-hierarchical and democratic, are necessary, and that their primary goal should be to create conditions where people can find their calling and practice it. This position entails, it seems to me, libertarian socialism.
Re: the discussion of classical liberalism: I think Glen is arguing for Chomsky’s position that pre-capitalist liberalism is the pre-cursor of anarchism. He explains this position here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60z2zGbGbfE
For a more detailed explication: http://www.spunk.org/library/intro/sp000281.html
dmf says
November 5, 2013 at 4:14 pmML, if you folks do get around to anarchisms do check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_May
dmf says
November 5, 2013 at 4:10 pmhttp://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2013/11/ed-rooksby-on-socialist-strategy-from-international-socialism-issue-140.html
soonnoo says
November 8, 2013 at 12:42 amChomsky seems to be @ odds on Kurzweil and sinularity (type) projection(s)..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvE4UhKmEfw
http://www.nndb.com/people/101/000032005/
http://www.kurzweilai.net/ask-ray-your-recent-book-mentioned-cuteness-and-made-me-wonder/comment-page-1#comment-234121
It seems moot for the greatest intelligence in any circumstance
to have provision for mistakes; there is really no need for it: I mean,
isn’t cute moot? What about bed bugs and alligators, isn’t cute really
relative; could Einstein be wrong. Of course not. (Jacob Bronowski
says it best.)
The real cliff hangar putting AI and hierarchy into the quantum puzzle
is the following:
http://www.junginstitute.org/pdf_files/JungV8N1p19-30.pdf
If a car could be cute, who could make the cutest car?
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Bronowski.html
http://www.nndb.com/people/339/000206718/
Here’s a cute baby! No make-up, she’s a doll.
Silicon based life forms may be here to stay.
http://www.livescience.com/40535-show-unveils-worlds-first-bionic-man.html