{"id":12557,"date":"2015-09-23T07:44:02","date_gmt":"2015-09-23T12:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12557"},"modified":"2015-09-23T07:44:02","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T12:44:02","slug":"history-doesnt-go-in-a-straight-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=12557","title":{"rendered":"History Doesn\u2019t Go In a Straight Line"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

History Doesn\u2019t Go In a Straight Line<\/a><\/h3>\n

Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and the potential for ordinary people to make radical change.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Noam<\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky in 2011. Andrew Rusk \/ Flickr<\/p>\n

T<\/span>hroughout his illustrious career, one of Noam Chomsky\u2019s chief preoccupations has been questioning \u2014 and urging us to question \u2014 the assumptions and norms that govern our society.<\/p>\n<\/header>\n

\n

Following a talk on power, ideology, and US\u00a0foreign policy\u00a0last weekend<\/a>\u00a0at the New School in New York City, freelance Italian journalist Tommaso Segantini sat down with the eighty-six-year-old to discuss some of the same themes, including how they relate to processes of social change.<\/p>\n

For radicals, progress requires puncturing the bubble of inevitability: austerity, for instance, \u201cis a policy decision undertaken by the designers for their own purposes.\u201d It is not implemented, Chomsky says, \u201cbecause of any economic laws.\u201d American capitalism also benefits from ideological obfuscation: despite its association with free markets, capitalism is shot through with subsidies for some of the most powerful private actors. This bubble needs popping too.<\/p>\n

In addition to discussing the prospects for radical change, Chomsky comments on the eurozone crisis, whether Syriza\u00a0could\u2019ve avoided submitting<\/a>\u00a0to Greece\u2019s creditors, and the significance of\u00a0Jeremy Corbyn<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Bernie Sanders<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And he remains soberly optimistic. \u201cOver time there\u2019s a kind of a general trajectory towards a more just society, with regressions and reversals of course.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

In an interview a couple of years ago, you said that the Occupy Wall Street movement had created a rare sentiment of solidarity in the US. September 17 was the fourth anniversary of the OWS movement. What is your evaluation of social movements such as OWS over the last twenty years? Have they been effective in bringing about change? How could they improve?<\/strong><\/p>\n

They\u2019ve had an impact; they have not coalesced into persistent and ongoing movements. It\u2019s a very atomized society. There are very few continuing organizations which have institutional memory, that know how to move to the next step and so on.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History Doesn\u2019t Go In a Straight Line Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and the potential for ordinary people to make radical change. Noam Chomsky in 2011. Andrew Rusk \/ Flickr Throughout his illustrious career, one of Noam Chomsky\u2019s chief preoccupations has been questioning \u2014 and urging us to question \u2014 the assumptions and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[5434,1806,111,9216,335,1167,8453,1880,8190,2236,1174,860],"class_list":["post-12557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-bernie-sanders","tag-bubble","tag-capitalism","tag-eurozone-crisis","tag-free-markets","tag-greece","tag-jeremy-corbyn","tag-noam-chomsky","tag-occupy-wall-street","tag-syriza","tag-us-foreign-policy","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12557"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12558,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12557\/revisions\/12558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}