SURVIVING THE 21ST CENTURY

The noted linguist and leftist stalwart meets Uruguay’s former president in wide-ranging conversation.

Chomsky, whom Mujica calls “the greatest crazy person left, in a world of great conformity,” grew up in the Depression, radicalized by his teenage visits to anarchist bookshops in New York City and a left libertarian ever since. For his part, Mujica was a Maoist guerrilla, but, as he tells moderator Alvídrez, after Uruguay’s military dictatorship ended, “we accepted the rules of liberal democracy.” Known as the “poor” president for retaining his austere lifestyle after being elected, Mujica has his eye largely on crises to come as the environmental situation worsens: He protests that he is not poor, has what he needs, and adds, “the fact is that if the world does not learn to live with a certain sobriety, not to squander, not to waste, if it does not learn this soon, our world will not survive.” In their back-and-forths, Chomsky seems relatively less interested in climate and more in the collapse of democracy, but both agree on a number of points. One is that capitalism is the great enemy: Says Mujica, “Capitalism is a culture, and we must respond to and resist capitalism with a different culture.” Another, with a nod to Chomsky’s long-standing commitment to anarchism, is that no form of authority is legitimate without the express consent of the people affected by it; Chomsky observes that rather than bail out the auto industry in 2008, President Obama could have turned it over to the workers and retooled it to produce high-speed trains, concluding, “If there had been sufficient education and organizing, different decisions could have been made.” Alvídrez does a good job of keeping the conversation moving along, and now that Mujica is no longer with us, it has a certain poignancy.

A valuable record of two contrarian political thinkers coming together to find common ground.