just showed this video to my 'anarchist theory' class.
I might call the position 'anarcho-statism.' He envisions a full-scale liberal welfare state, a wild expansion of it, in fact. He wants "a bigger cage' until we break free of all cages. First he says that we are being victimized by 'state-supported capitalists and corporations,' then he presents the state as the solution to the bad effects of capitalism, what's protecting us. He might as well be FDR, okay? Then he says 'there is no contradiction,' which is just silly. By his own terms, increasing the power and resources of the state and people's dependence on it will also in the long run consolidate the power of capital.
One reason for this, I would say, is that he's much more socially affiliated with leftism than with anarchism per se, and so many of his allies are the biggest statists in the universe: socialists, Marxists, etc. But Chomsky's anti-statism is merely verbal, a distant ideal against which he's working in the present as he tries to market his bigger cage.
Many self-professed anarchists, David Graeber for example, have versions of this. Work it out, y'all, one way or the other!
