Noam Chomsky's secular stairway to Heaven

Chomsky on Anarchism

Selected and edited by Barry Pateman
Oakland: AK Press, 2005, 241 pp. pb.

reviewed by MC5, November, 2005

This collection of articles confirms MIM's previous statements about the nature of today's anarchism and Chomsky's version of anarchism in particular. The book jacket says, "we all know what Noam Chomsky is against. . . in this flood of publishing and republishing, very little ever gets said about what exactly Chomsky stands for, his own personal politics, his vision of the future." After reading that, MIM had to buy this book.

Very accurately, Chomsky gives the following self-description: "Sometimes one tactic is right, sometimes another one. 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. . . . Many people . . . find they cannot act as, let's say, organizers in their community unless they have a detailed vision of the future that they are going to try to achieve. OK, that's the way they perceive the world and themselves. I would not presume to tell them it's wrong. Maybe it is right for them, but it is not right for me." (pp. 237-8)

Thanks to his concentrated attention to factual investigation and the tactical level, in the last 25 years (but less so lately) we can say that Chomsky serves as the ideal agitator, minus his occasional forays into topics he does not really put much effort into. Chomsky and for that matter Ward Churchill talk about the united $tates internally and abroad from internationalist perspectives in the concrete details. They get into the news events of the day and show the evils being perpetrated by u.$. imperialism. In fact, we should be clear that Chomsky often does it better than MIM does. We can go further than that and say that some MIM members and circles are too shy to go in public the way Chomsky does. It's the energy that Chomsky has in going to public meeting after meeting with factually detailed and referenced agitation that makes him close to the ideal agitator. One thing we hope to convince people is that Noam Chomsky was not always as effective as he is today. Young people should make the systematic and sustained effort to become agitators like Chomsky. Agitators are the lifeblood of the party, not theoreticians or other bureaucrats. Ideally we seek to take Noam Chomskys and Ward Churchills and plug them in as Agitation Ministers in charge of media, organizing demonstrations and running public talks. Of course they should have logistical help from other types of persynalities in the background. The reason this does not happen of course is that people do have theoretical disunities and if the only reason were to struggle to unite the Agitation Ministry, we would need a Theory Ministry for that purpose.

Minus the references to communism and the Spanish Civil War, Chomsky would be the ideal MIM Agitation Minister. Those of us unclear on the difference between agitation and theory can make use of Chomsky he did not intend. In his political works, there is no theory. About 5% is overarching ideology. 95% of his discussion of Indonesia, the Middle East, Central America, Vietnam etc. qualifies as "agitation." (We know this word is old-fashioned but we still have no better word for it.) Where Chomsky is not agitation he is veering into writing of history itself. So if we do not know the difference between theory and agitation, we can read Chomsky and be cured of that problem, for at most there is implicit theory in Chomsky and that is how agitation should be.

The unfortunate bottom line is that after this book we are left believing even more than before that anarchism and anarchists in general since the 1930s conscientiously avoid a grip on reality. As we said in a previous book review, Chomsky represents the pinnacle of what we can expect from pre-scientific reasoning, what he himself calls Enlightenment thought.(e.g, p. 122) For Chomsky, the Enlightenment taught that if there is not a reason for a social structure, that structure should be torn down. Chomsky is correct that he took that idea directly from the Enlightenment and that is all his anarchism amounts to--the original salvoes of Liberalism taking down absolute monarchism. Even in this more ideological and philosophical book of Chomsky's, we find that the bottom line is just negation, not proof that his anarchism has done a better job of negating than other thoughts derived from the Enlightenment such as Marxism.

The closest Chomsky comes to a basic scientific framework is the idea that freedom is the pre-condition of freedom. In other words, to learn how to de-colonize a people must learn on the job. So the theory would be that any authoritarian approach such as Marx's would be self-defeating because learning on the job is necessary. Yet, in the end, Chomsky admits he took this notion from Kant (p. 122) and he admits he does not intend it in scientific fashion: "Today's science is far from being able to establish the fact, but we can only hope that Bakunin's 'instinct for freedom' is truly a central constituent element of human nature."(p. 152) So once again a pre-scientific dogma of hope is asserted in the place where science is necessary. Chomsky flirts with theory and then dispenses with it.

In fact, it is clear that the unscientific secular dogma of the humyn need for freedom is at the center of Chomsky's definition of anarchism: "The burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met."(p. 178) By dogma which he admits "science is far from being able to establish," Chomsky disallows the possibility that dismantling one authority may lead to worse authorities or more authorities where there used to be none. There is only the Idea of bringing down authority reigning high in Heaven frowning on authorities below on earth. It is exactly this act of Chomsky's carried out by many other anarchists that makes today's alleged anarchism the best fig-leaf for authoritarianism there is. To the probing minds of this world, Chomsky and the other alleged anarchists say "don't go there; don't touch that, because science can't do anything about it anyway." So in the end, Chomsky's brand of anarchism is really just philosophical nihilism that trails off into mysticism.

We would dispute the idea that there is really any anarchism in Chomsky's thought. Chomsky says himself he is a "fellow traveller" of anarchism, not an "anarchist thinker." (p. 135) What there is in Chomsky is an almost systematic pre-scientific internationalist ethics and nihilist method--ideas which are peripheral currents or occasional allies of anarchism but not sufficient to be anarchism in themselves. Chomsky is in fact a paradigm example of how there has been no self-named anarchism since the 1930s. Having failed the tests of reality presented since 1917, self-named anarchism ceased to be anarchism and morphed into secular religion once Franco triumphed. We would make an exception only for the Sakai-supporting trend of anarchists.

Kropotkin is an example of a scientific anarchist who would not have accepted Chomsky's namby-pamby pre-scientific moralism: "[Anarchism] by showing that the 'struggle for existence' must be conceived not merely in its restricted sense of a struggle between individuals for all the means of subsistence but in its wider sense of adaptation of all individuals of the species to the best conditions for the survival of the species, as well as the greatest possible sum of life and happiness for each and all, is [sic.] has permitted us to deduce the laws of moral science from the social needs and habits of mankind. . . . It has thus enforced the opinion of social reformers as to the necessity of modifying the conditions of life for improving man, instead of trying to improve human nature by moral teachings while life works in the opposite direction." ("Anarchist Communism") In other words, Kropotkin was interested in the causes of people's search for freedom, while Chomsky believes there is no such science. Kropotkin said the moral man exudes intellectual energy and added: "Our first duty is to find out by an analysis of society, its characteristic tendencies at a given moment of evolution and to state them clearly. Then, to act according to those tendencies in our relations with all those who think as we do. And, finally, from today and especially during a revolutionary period, work for the destruction of the institutions, as well as the prejudices that impede the development of such tendencies." ("Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal") Kropotkin was convinced that circumstances were underlying the moral beliefs of the people. There is no way to implant moral beliefs just by taking a dogma and preaching it: "Anarchism does not recognize any method other than the natural-scientific, and it applies this method to all the so-called humanitarian sciences." ("Modern Science and Anarchism")

In 1917 it was still unclear what trend of thought would triumph in Russia and globally. Imperialism has shown some strength in living past the 1930s. Kropotkin and other anarchists of the day recalled that the French Revolution went through twists and turns. However, Franco's triumph, the failure of anarchists in China and the spate of Bolshevik revolutions and Bolshevik aid to de-colonization made it inevitable that surviving anarchism in 2005 threw aside Kropotkin's scientific brand of anarchism. To continue as an anarchist apart from Bolshevism today is a purely dogmatic act. As if no social change of any merit has occurred in the last 80 years thanks to the Bolsheviks, the anarchists call to their aid post-modernism so as to equate any and all opinions. What starts with Kropotkin and science when anarchism had proletarian vigour ends with Chomsky and post-modernism when alleged anarchism is left only as petty-bourgeois moralizing no better than nor worse than any other ideology according to alleged anarchism's post-modern allies. For just the surviving improvements in the status of wimmin today in China alone that Mao brought about, we would have to dispense with all of so-called anarchism and take up Bolshevism. Avoiding that sort of confrontation with reality is what most of alleged anarchism and Trotskyism are about today.

Not surprisingly, Chomsky ends up advocating for the economic interests of the 80% of people inside u.$. borders. (p. 188) Instead of concluding that the u.$. petty-bourgeoisie has grown in size thus decreasing class conflict between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, he concludes that repression of strikes has become much less violent because of progress under capitalism. (pp. 229-30) Meanwhile in the case of Spain, he does call the people the Communist Party represented "middle class." (p. 50) Apparently Chomsky has not given much thought to economic changes taking place and how the Spanish Communist Party's "middle class" of the Depression 1930s compares with the "workers" of Amerika today or he would have bit his tongue.

Somehow Chomsky manages to pooh-pooh the transitional ideas of Marx, Lenin and Stalin but he imports transitional reforms into his own views on an ad hoc basis without much thought that we should sum that up as well and hold Chomsky accountable for his own "theory" of transition to compare with Marxism's. Chomsky's comments on the u.$. economic situation are a rare lapse in his internationalism, because Pinkertons and that sort of repression are alive and well in other countries squeezed by u.$. imperialism. In another review, we pointed out that Chomsky has kind words to say for the benevolence of Japanese imperialism. It's this sort of thing that Lenin would not say or include in his theory of transition, so we at MIM are demanding a full across-the-board comparison between anarchism and scientific communism when it comes to the intermediate steps to the lofty goal of anarchism.

Chomsky admits where his thought comes from: "I rather agree with Rudolf Rocker's perception that these (quite central) tendencies in anarchism draw from the best of the Enlightenment and classic liberal thought."(p. 181) Despite taking his thought from the major precursors to Western Liberalism, Chomsky lumps Bolshevism and Liberalism together both as fig-leafs for authoritarianism: "Bolshevism and liberalism have united in their opposition to popular revolution," he says.(1969; p. 47) According to Chomsky, "Lenin was one of the greatest enemies of socialism." (p. 183) Yet he does not attempt to prove that anarchists have done more to alleviate authoritarianism in the real world than Marxists or Liberals. The closest he comes to a sustained attempt at approaching a comparison of Bolshevism and anarchism is his lengthy treatment of the Spanish Civil War in the eyes of Amerikan liberal scholars. (MIM uses the upper-case "Liberal" for the general philosophy of Liberalism and "liberal" to refer to the left-leaning reform wing of Liberalism in Amerika.) For that matter, though he skewers liberals, he does not prove that his version of Enlightenment thought is really separate from Liberalism. Even less does he prove that anarchism has not served as an even greater fig-leaf for the status quo than either Liberalism or Marxism. If it turns out that divisive rhetoric like Chomsky's does not bring about change in the real world, then we need to ask whether in fact it is a prop of the status quo.

His incidental comments on Spain are the closest Chomsky gets to validating his whole approach, so let's start by accepting the entirety of his argument about Spain: 1) Stalin and Bolsheviks misunderstood England's geopolitical interests, because England was actually hopelessly pro-Franco; (pp. 68-71) 2) Bolsheviks put land reform on the backburner; 3) Bolsheviks and other Republicans caused a civil war within the civil war that demoralized the anarchists and Republicans generally.

Chomsky gets lost in details of Spain, but the overall question needed for a comparison of Bolshevism and anarchism never gets asked in any of Chomsky's work for any country of the last 90 years. Chomsky tells us only that the anarchists were the carriers of the true faith in Spain, not that they were able to overcome the obstacles including the alleged ones from Bolsheviks. He freely admits that they did not overcome their obstacles. Trotskyists argue in a similar fashion. It does not occur to them that naming the carriers of the true faith in the context of Spain only exposes them as the incapable people unable to unite the oppressed and exploited and defeat Franco.

In contrast, when it comes to Mao, we are able to point to anarchist leaders now documented as police informers by anarchist historians. We also know that anarchists ended up on Central Committee of the Guomindang (that subsequently ruled reactionary Taiwan) and died with full funeral commemorations by the Guomindang. Yet this did not stop Mao from kicking out imperialists, carrying out the greatest advance for wimmin of any place and time in world history, collectivizing land and putting worker committees in charge of industry. Even with Chomsky's idea that one learns freedom by freedom, under Mao workers had their chance to run industry, even if capitalism did come back. That learning is not all lost.

The anarchists and Trotskyists argue that Stalin and his admirers prevented them from carrying out social change, but it is not as if stupid and evil people existed only in Spain. The test is carrying out change in spite of stupid and evil people in the way of change in any country. Stupid and evil people in the way have to be part of the assumptions of any scientific analysis. If we do not use the test of real world change and instead substitute Chomsky's ordination of who is carrying the words of the true faith, or who is carrying the superior couplets of poetry--then we argue no differently than how religion does. The fact that Chomsky's is a secular religion does not make it less a religion.

This is the point that despite more the 150 years since Marx started popularizing the materialist philosophy of his day, most intellectuals still do not absorb. There are in fact more intellectuals saying they know what materialism is who in fact do not know than there are intellectuals who do know what materialism is. The vast majority of intellectuals in the West still practice a form of secular religion. Chomsky's version of the Ten Commandments may have more internationalist content than those of unabashed Bible-thumpers, but the basic underlying style of reasoning is the same.

Chomsky's idealist style of reasoning is in the open repeatedly in the book. In response to us writers of Maoist tracts, Chomsky has said among other things in recent years: "If we undertake the rational comparison, we conclude, indeed, that the Communist economic model was a disaster; and the Western one an even more catastrophic failure."(p. 201) This is Chomsky's back-handed way of admitting MIM's central attack. Chomsky does not entertain that alleged anarchist economic models are such a catastrophic failure that people do not try them anymore. There is nothing to compare in the real world. So when he says the communist model was a disaster, he is condemning from on high in secular Heaven, not based on anything happening here on terra firma. Had Chomsky plunked himself down in the capital of Chomskyland and said, "here in this society we have demonstrated that we can do better than communism and Western Liberalism," MIM's argument would have to be entirely different.

Instead, Chomsky and other alleged anarchists propose a fight which we believe the scientific anarchists of the 1917 era would have disallowed: "you stand there in the boxing ring with your real body so I can punch you, but I will stand outside the boxing ring while we conduct this fight, so you cannot punch me." Indeed, while standing outside the boxing ring, Chomsky lands blow after blow below the belt (and even below the knees) to our bewildered scientific communist fighter who wonders what the hell is going on as he looks to the other corner for a fighter to come out when there is none, only Chomsky behind him outside the ring taking shots at his calves.

Step one on Chomsky's secular stairway to Heaven is that no factual generalizations about people in politics are possible:
1) "So little is known about human nature that you cannot draw any serious conclusions." (p. 240) (If so, we wonder how he can declaim Marxism, but that would be to forget that Chomsky is allowed to stand outside the boxing ring by the rules of the pre-scientific game.)

Within anarchism, Chomsky also sees no scientific content:
2) "I don't think it is possible to ask whether it is effective or not." (p. 234)

Compared with Marxism and its use of the state, Chomsky finds that anarchism requires no systematic evaluation when it also makes use of state structures or self-defense that might be dubbed authoritarian:
3) "Ah, but I think these questions cannot be given a general answer." (p. 140)

Even when it comes to a contrast between Engels and anarchist Bakunin, Chomsky admits he has no scientific answer to the substance of the question:
4) "I do not pretend to know the answer to this question."(p. 121)

Our reader will pardon us at this point if we say that Chomsky has taken sides on a mystical basis. Instead of confronting each scientific question that comes his way and doing his best with it, he consistently takes a step up on the secular stairway to Heaven.

Chomsky comes right out and says that Social Security is a state institution that should be defended (p. 231) and we cannot say what self-defense and military organizations anarchists will need. (pp. 139-41) In other words, Marxist use of the state is bad, but according to Chomsky an anarchist can still be an anarchist and use the state and sometimes defend existing state structures of imperialism. (p. 194) Worse, Chomsky says there is no comparison necessary between anarchist use of the state and Marxist use of the state, for we can generalize about Marxist use of the state, but not anarchist use. The Marxist boxer must stand in the ring with a real body to take blows, but anarchism need not according to Chomsky. Thus the central point of alleged anarchism today is a lack of systematic approach, an intellectual laziness by most of today's alleged anarchists. He denounces the "New Mandarins" among intellectuals serving the state, but he shows no systematic way to make himself accountable to the oppressed and exploited. Somehow he holds Marxism accountable but not his brand of anarchism. It is a general characteristic of alleged anarchism today that it is the most unaccountable defense of hierarchy possible.

The question we need to ask globally to communicate with Chomsky is how much unjust structure is there to overthrow and how much was overthrown how fast by various approaches. We submit that there was more injustice for wimmin in China that Mao undid than Chomsky's beloved anarchists had to deal with or attempted to deal with in Spain, China or any combination of countries in the world. The collectivization of agriculture went further in Albania than in Spain. And so on. Alleged anarchists including Chomsky in this whole book never attempt to go down the line and ask globally "how far backward was the situation and whose approach really did the most to drag things forward?" For example, does he think anarchists somewhere defeated Hitler? For if so, we have a different version of history that we believe he should learn.