Noam Chomsky with Paul Mattick: New Social Environment #33

Legendary linguist, author, historian, and political commentator Noam Chomsky joins the Rail community for a hopeful discussion on democracy during the pandemic and beyond. A thoughtful leader in political discourse, Chomsky chats with the Rail’s Field Notes editor, Paul Mattick and engages with some of our audience members for an unforgettable discussion. In response to the imminent crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Brooklyn Rail shifted our operations online. These New Social Environments provide a place to have vibrant conversations in a time of great physical distancing.

Learn more: https://brooklynrail.org/events/2020/04/30/noam-chomsky-with-paul-mattick

Here’s a look back at an interview with Chomsky and Mattick from our Dec 16–Jan 17 issue, directly after the Trump election, “Work can be undertaken to create an authentic independent political party, a real party, based on popular participation from the ground up, not a top-down candidate producing organization like the two official parties, working from school boards to state legislatures and beyond. Not easy in the regressive U.S. political system, but not impossible. The labor movement can be rebuilt, as has happened before after sharp declines. Major efforts have to be undertaken to bring the general public to understand the real reasons for their plight, and the possibilities for radical social and political change to construct meaningful popular control of all institutions—in communities, in the workplace, in the larger society, and on to the international order. No slight challenge, but the stakes are very high: literally, the survival of organized human society in any decent form.”⁠

As is Rail tradition, the lunch hour will be closed with a poem read by a member of our community. Today's poet is Zoe Hitzig, a poet and PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University. Her poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, New Statesman, Boston Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Her writing about poetry has appeared in BOMB and Prac Crit. Mezzanine is her first book. https://bookshop.org/books/mezzanine-poems/9780062977434

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