Noam Chomsky on America's Economic Suicide | Economy. May 4, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. Noam Chomsky has not just been watching the Occupy movement. A veteran of the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-intervention movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, he’s given lectures at Occupy Boston and talked with occupiers across the US. His new book, Occupy, published in the Occupied Media Pamphlet Series by Zuccotti Park Press brings together several of those lectures, a speech on “occupying foreign policy” and a brief tribute to his friend and co-agitator Howard Zinn. From his speeches, and in this conversation, it’s clear that the emeritus MIT professor and author is as impressed by the spontaneous, cooperative communities some Occupy encampments created, as he is by the movement’s political impact.
We’re a nation whose leaders are pursuing policies that amount to economic “suicide” Chomsky says. We talked in his office, for Free Speech TV on April 24. LF: And politically…? Home. Occupy | MapBox. All Posters. Occupy Wall Street's anarchist roots. Almost every time I'm interviewed by a mainstream journalist about Occupy Wall Street I get some variation of the same lecture: "How are you going to get anywhere if you refuse to create a leadership structure or make a practical list of demands? And what's with all this anarchist nonsense - the consensus, the sparkly fingers? Don't you realise all this radical language is going to alienate people?
You're never going to be able to reach regular, mainstream Americans with this sort of thing! " If one were compiling a scrapbook of worst advice ever given, this sort of thing might well merit an honourable place. After all, since the financial crash of 2007, there have been dozens of attempts to kick-off a national movement against the depredations of the United States' financial elites taking the approach such journalists recommended. All failed. I should be clear here what I mean by "anarchist principles".
Anarchism versus Marxism How, then, did OWS embody anarchist principles? FSTV's "Occupy The Media" May Day Coverage. The #Occupy MOVEMENT.