Russia’s war in Ukraine has rallied support for the expansion of NATO—even long-time holdouts like Finland are now joining the alliance.The Breach’s full int...
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.
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.”