About Author
GEORGE FISH is a freelance writer and socialist activist in Indianapolis, Indiana, who writes extensively on left politics and pop music. His political writings and political analyses of blues and pop music have appeared in Against the Current, Socialism and Democracy, In These Times, Monthly Review, Political Affairs, and other left publications. He currently writes CD reviews for the online Blues Blast magazine, had a column, "Blues and More," for two years in the Bloomington (IN) Alternative, and has a political blog at www.politicallyincorrectleftist.blogspot.com. He can be contacted at mailto:georgefish666@yahoo.com.
Footnotes
1. This is noted significantly in two writings by Marxists themselves, rather gushingly by Ursula McTaggart in her article, "Can We Build Socialist-Anarchist Alliances? Revolution Meets Apocalypse," in Against the Current 141 (July/August 2009), more realistically and soberly by Marvin Mandell in his book review, "Anarchism and Socialism," in New Politics 47 (Summer 2009). Mandell ends his review by writing, "I think Marxists and Anarchists can learn from each other and, in fact, need each other."
2. Chomsky quotes the following from council communist Paul Mattick’s Marx and Keynes (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1969), p. 295: "The anti-Bolshevik, left-wing labor movement opposed the Leninists because they did not go far enough in exploiting the Russian upheavals for strictly proletarian ends. They became prisoners of their environment and used the international radical movement to satisfy specifically Russian needs, which soon became synonymous with the needs of the Bolshevik Party-State. The ‘bourgeois’ aspects of the Russian Revolution were now discovered in Bolshevism itself: Leninism was adjudged a part of international social-democracy, differing from the latter only on tactical issues." On Marx, Chomsky writes on p. 185 of Chomsky on Anarchism, "There are continuities from Marx to Lenin, but there are also continuities to Marxists who were harshly critical of Lenin and Bolshevism."
3. This is the proper point to discuss my own assessment of Bolshevik authoritarianism and its relation to the liberatory goals of the Russian Revolution. I begin by noting the famous remark of the U.S. general on the destruction of the Vietnamese village in Ben Tre in 1970: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." I then note Marx’s classic remark at the beginning of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." "Saving" Ben Tre in this context was thus the farce, "saving" the democratic, socialist character of the Russian Revolution under the authoritarian rule of Lenin and Trotsky the tragedy. Which, however, was still a far cry from the totalitarian destruction of that legacy by Stalin. An important critique of Bolshevik authoritarianism under Lenin and Trotsky is found in Tom Smith’s "Beyond Hero Worship: A Marxist Critique of Bolshevik Terror and Its Indebtedness to Jacobinism," Socialism and Democracy 20 (Summer 1996). In Socialism and Democracy 43 (March 2007), Theodore Allen notes perspicaciously in "Base and Superstructure and the Socialist Perspective," p. 84: "After the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in Russia, Lenin declared, ‘We shall now proceed to build the Socialist order!’ But it was not to be; instead, beset by enemies in all directions and lacking elementary resources and technical personnel, the Bolsheviks embarked upon what would prove to be the irretrievably slippery slope into bourgeois habits of administration and production in the hopeless expectation of establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat over a population 90% peasantry." Stephen F. Cohen notes pointedly of Trotsky’s struggle for inner-party democracy in Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 155, "his sudden commitment to democratic procedures being [considered] suspect if only because previously he had been among the most authoritarian of Bolshevik leaders." And even Lenin had to admit in 1921, "Our present state is such that the entire organized proletariat must defend itself; we must use the workers’ organizations for the defense of the workers from their state and for the defense by the workers of our state." (Emphasis added.) Against the Current 131 (November/December 2007), in carrying two articles commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, omitted to note that the working masses of the Soviet Union itself had backed the dismantling of the state and "socialism" that came out of that upheaval of 1917 even before that revolution’s 75th anniversary!
4. Chomsky pointedly says in regard to Taylorism, "Lenin was very enamored of it. He had about the same conceptions as capitalist managers and the idea was to robotize work." (p. 224)
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Chomsky, Anarchism, and Socialism
Summer 2010 | Vol:XIII-1 | Whole #: 49 |
By: Noam Chomsky
Selected and edited by Barry Pateman. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007, 241 pp. paper, $16.95
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Reviewed by George Fish
For several years I worked closely with an anarchist youth collective in Indianapolis that ran a left-wing bookstore. While they were a bold, feisty group of determined activists (a welcome change from the timid and hidebound peace church "progressives" that dominate the left in Indianapolis) with whom I very much enjoyed working, I did find their anti-intellectualism disquieting. When I raised this to one of the members of the collective as a blemish on their otherwise sterling radical commitment and activity, he objected, "But we have people who don’t even read Chomsky!"
That makes this Noam Chomsky collection published in 2007, Chomsky on Anarchism, all the more relevant. Good activism requires good intellect and knowledge, and activism alone is simply insufficient, and ultimately ineffective, without these. Which makes it even more disquieting; for, I’m afraid, these young anarchist youth "who don’t even read Chomsky" would find this compact volume simply above their heads — for all the wrong reasons. For Chomsky is nothing if not erudite, knowledgeable and scholarly, truly the MIT professor he is both as anarchist and as distinguished linguist. He is indeed these, even though he can also be repetitive, simplistic, and given to misplaced sarcasm — all of which can be found in Chomsky on Anarchism, but which judicious editing and selection has thankfully kept to a minimum. Which means Chomsky on Anarchism, a compendium of selected interviews, essays and book excerpts from 1969 to 2004, plays on Chomsky’s strengths — his erudition, knowledge, and scholarly approach — and much less on his weaknesses. This makes Chomsky on Anarchism both valuable and informative, even for those of us on the left who question his basic anarchist premises.
Chomsky is quite straightforward about the appeal anarchism holds for him. He raises it at the beginning of an interview from 1995, where he notes that he was drawn to anarchism as a teenager because it expressed to him "the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met." (p. 178) But he also affirms the desirability of democracy and generally accepting community norms unless they are intolerable (and for Chomsky, mere disagreement with them is insufficient for violating them), and objects to the notion (held by many other anarchists) that democracy is simply "a tyranny of the majority." Chomsky further refuses to conflate democracy with parliamentary or legislative rule, and bluntly notes that the Founding Fathers wished to establish a system that, while democratic as compared to the political systems then extant in Europe, would first and foremost prevent "crimes" against property, and that U.S. legislative democracy was used in the 19th century to uphold both the chattel slavery of Blacks as well as the wage slavery of industrial workers. (p. 182) So there is much in Chomsky’s somewhat unorthodox notion of anarchism (many anarchists see Chomsky as essentially a reformist) that we "state socialists" would agree with, defend and applaud! Indeed, much that as a Marxist I could readily accept, so already there is an important political common ground here.[1]
Of course, an important parting of the ways between anarchists and many socialists occurs on the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution and its course, not just on Stalin and afterwards, but also on the nature of the Revolution under Lenin and Trotsky. Here Chomsky gets simplistic, as not only does he question whether the Bolsheviks were harbingers of socialism at all, but also, he sees the authoritarian rule of Lenin and Trotsky as laying the foundations for the totalitarian rule of Stalin, and sees the demise of an authentically working-class, democratic socialism in Russia and elsewhere as stemming in part from the doctrines and practices of Marx and Engels themselves.[2] The nefariousness of the Bolsheviks is a topic extensively featured in Chomsky on Anarchism.
Against Leninism and Bolshevism Chomsky upholds for keen political insight not only Bakunin (whom he holds as prophetic); Daniel Guérin, for whose Anarchism: From Theory to Practice he wrote an introduction; and anarchist theorists Rudolf Rocker, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman; but also Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Mattick, Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch and even the pre-Bolshevik Trotsky, whom he sees as libertarian foils and correct prognosticators of Leninism and its disastrously authoritarian, anti-socialist consequences.[3] Chomsky’s position on Leninism, while oversimplified, is not without elements of merit and political insight for revolutionary socialists to seriously consider.
For Chomsky, the democratic aspirations and practices of the "primitives" are the core of any truly socialist revolution, and their democratic self-determination its very heart and soul. Chomsky on Anarchism devotes three substantive sections to affirming this: first, Chomsky’s discussion of the initial anarchist success and later destruction of the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939 (pp. 40-74); and again, in the resistance to dismantling egalitarianism in the former Communist countries by the working people there (pp. 196-198), and of factory workers and organized labor in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries (pp. 202-205).
Suppressing this "inner nature" through elitist manipulation of people’s consciousness and outright imposition of anti-democratic values and practices by technocratic intellectuals serving private and state-sponsored tyrannies, both "socialist" and capitalist, is a key concept in Chomsky’s political thought, and is discussed at length a number of places in Chomsky on Anarchism, notably in regard to the "pacification" of Vietnam in the 1960s (pp. 11-39, 74-75); the "engineering of consent" and dulling of the "instinct for freedom" in the political, economic, and social realm of modern societies against the "rabble" (pp. 158-172); and the role of Taylorism and the undermining of the liberating aspects of labor-saving technology to impose and maintain "industrial feudalism" (pp. 224-230).[4] For Chomsky, there is a direct confluence of ideas in the elitist notions of liberal capitalist intellectuals such as Daniel Bell (of End of Ideology fame), Walter Lippmann, and Edward Bernays, "father of public relations," and the "Leninist idea of a vanguard party that leads the stupid masses to a better life that they cannot conceive or construct on their own." (See p. 41 for Bell, pp. 167-169 for Bernays and Lippmann. The quote on Leninism occurs on p. 169.) While some of this "confluence" is a typically Chomskian oversimplification, there’s a strong kernel of truth to it that dare not be denied, dismissed, or ignored by we of the Marxist left. Just think of Richard Nixon chummily hobnobbing with "Leninists" Mao Zedong and Leonid Brezhnev!
Another oversimplification by Chomsky here lies in his negative view of intellectuals, which deterministically reduces them to careerists, commissars, or apologists, regardless of ideology. Perhaps it’s just in the hyperbolic and absolute way he describes intellectuals, but, by Chomsky’s own use of language, he can’t describe how a Noam Chomsky could arise out of this pile of bought-off satraps called the intelligentsia! Starting with a very valid distinction between "aristocrats" and "democrats" which he attributes to Thomas Jefferson, he then asserts that this distinction was further developed by Bakunin, who predicted the rise of a "new class" of intellectuals who would impose their rule on the masses in the form of a "Red bureaucracy" should a Marxist movement come to power. (pp. 205-6) However, Chomsky does develop out of this a very telling critique of the intellectual faddishness of Postmodernism and especially Derrida, and properly calls on "young radical activists" not to be "intimidated by the incomprehensible gibberish that [often] comes out of left-wing intellectual movements . . . which is just impossible to understand." What this "incomprehensible gibberish" does, in his eyes, is "[make] people feel they’re not going to do anything because, unless I somehow understand the latest version of post-modern this and that, I can’t go out in the streets and organize people, because I’m not bright enough." (p. 217)
As with the confluence notion above, despite Chomsky’s oversimplification there is an important kernel of truth in what Chomsky expresses; once again, a kernel the left ignores only at its own peril. And yes, some intellectuals are indeed "aristocrats," of both the capitalist and "communist" variety. But others choose to be "democrats," learned tribunes of the people — and among them are many of the people Chomsky expresses admiration for in this book, not to mention Chomsky himself!
Indeed, there are many kernels of truth contained in Chomsky on Anarchism, much that is perceptive, insightful, and establishes common political ground between those who are more traditional socialists and those who are anarchists. Of especial interest in this regard is the discussion of the nature and restructuring of work (pp. 141-148) and the nature of language, and how it relates to freedom (pp. 101-114).
Especially relevant here for establishing common ground for productive political work that unites both socialists and anarchists is Chomsky’s limited, pragmatic support for state authority in order to protect the people’s rights and gains, which even calls for a strengthening of state authority in some cases. (pp. 193, 214, and 231)
This is the traditional socialist notion of using the state to advance the people’s struggle, to achieve positive gains for the people. Chomsky even admits he votes, especially in local elections, but also supports voting for Greens and other independents in national ones. Common political ground between socialists and anarchists indeed.
And last, Chomsky on Anarchism even offers us left activists important caveats for improving and strengthening our work, and not simply getting stuck in the routine of going to meeting after meeting despite the lack of results. One of those caveats, as expressed above, is brooking no tolerance for "incomprehensible gibberish" from supposedly left-wing intellectuals. Two others involve considering the dangers inherent even in democratically structured meetings, and properly emphasizing the importance of tactics as well as principles. Chomsky writes very perspicaciously on the last:
Talk of tactics sounds sort of trivial, but it is not. Tactical choices are the ones that have real human consequences. We can try to go beyond the more general strategic choices — speculatively and with open minds — but beyond that we descend into abstract generalities. Tactics have to do with decisions about what to do next, they have real human consequences. (p. 237)
In short, Chomsky on Anarchism is a valuable political text on a myriad number of subjects. Which is precisely why the book’s lack of an index is a glaring flaw in an otherwise highly useful and valuable book.