This is pretty fun. Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault debating each other in 1971, defining some of the key tensions on the left today:
Just, cool: Chomsky’s earnest “you have to start somewhere” anarchism and Foucault’s suggestion that you will never take enough red pills. Chomsky’s insistence that a journey of 1,000 miles starts with one footstep, Foucault’s gleeful wallowing in Zeno’s Paradox.
Also pretty good: The recent Jacobin podcast interview with Gary Gerstle, author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order:
It’s tempting sometimes to think that everything is just very now and can’t possibly have anything to do with some vague back then. But you’re always hearing the echoes of or living through the death throes of something from that vague back then.
These two videos pair well. The neoliberal left loves the cultural trappings of resistance that Chomsky outlines, but despises any analysis that argues our current order is anything other than liberatory, preferring to channel desire for more or other into consumption. And it abuses Foucault to paralyze any conception of liberation that tries to transcend the market or consumption.