Noam Chomsky

ON JULY 29, 2010, Vaughn Cartwright and Emmanuel J. Tellez interviewed Noam Chomsky, prolific author and activist, on behalf of The Platypus Review, to discuss the history of the Left and the state of radical politics today. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. Vaughn Cartwright: In our society, it behooves intellectuals to avoid radical opposition to capitalism and the state. This was as true in the 1960s when you wrote your famous essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” as it is now. [Read More]

ONE FINDS QUITE A BIT OF NAME-CALLING among the innumerable articles and blog posts written in criticism of Hugo Chavez and his government. Although most of this invective is not very illuminating, one article by a young, Colombian, Trotsky-ish labor organizer describes Chavez perfectly in two words: a “postmodern Bonapartist.” Chavez, his Bolivarian Revolution, and his project of “21st Century Socialism” are postmodern in the sense that they exist in a discontinuity, in an amnesiac disconnect, with the modernist project of social and political emancipation that started with the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century and withered and died sometime in the late 20th century. [Read More]

DURING HIS VISIT TO NEW YORK this week to address the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is scheduled to go to Columbia University to address faculty members and also to meet with a group of American religious leaders. His arrival was preceded by weeks of commotion and dispute: should Ahmadinejad have been allowed to visit ground zero? Should Columbia have agreed to host him? Should he even have been granted a visa to enter at all? [Read More]